Philip Roth's 'The Plot Against America' Creates Alternate, Anti-Semetic U.S. History

While he's probably not the last literary novelist one would expect to go wading into the none too prestigious field of alternate history, it's still surprising to see such a lionized eminence as Philip Roth trying his hand at it. The transition is eased somewhat by the fact that Roth starts his newest novel, The Plot Against America (available in paperback in September) in a setting very familiar to his readers, namely, the Newark neighborhood where he grew up in the 1930s. Another common trope of the author is on display, the melding of his fictional and real selves, by having the book be narrated by his fictional self (Philip Roth himself, not the alter ego of some of the author's more scabrous work, Nathan Zuckerman) , making the novel not so much about America than about what might have happened to the Roths, had things gone differently at a crucial time in history.

The imaginary event that sparks The Plot Against America into action is the June 1940 nomination of Charles A. Lindbergh as the Republican presidential candidate. The dynamically isolationist Lindbergh ably beats Roosevelt in the election on the strength of his stump speech: "Your choice is simple … It's between Lindbergh and war." His profile burnished to a heroic glow by the passing of time, Lindbergh is still remembered by most Americans for being simply that stalwart, Gary Cooper-looking pilot who flew across the Atlantic in 1927 - his racist beliefs and pro-Nazi statements, while widely known today, have somehow not tarnished his reputation. In Roth's hands, he emerges as a distant and rather frighteningly popular demagogue able to steer the country into potentially fatal indecision and Nazi-pandering.

The novel is set up as a memoir of the two years following Lindbergh's election, when seven-year-old Philip and the rest of the Roth family endures the long, slowly encroaching shadows of anti-Semitism, none too subtly encouraged by the White House. The Roths, as described here, were like many in their community, not especially religious and unused to prejudice as a part of their daily lives. Through Philip's eyes, the reader witnesses the terrifyingly slow and steady advance of a Nazi-esque program to purify the country of non-Aryan elements. Instead of marching off to liberate France from the scourge of tyranny, the Greatest Generation stays home and implements a similar tyranny on their own soil. And young Philip talks of Lindbergh as "the first famous living American whom I learned to hate," the man whose election "assaulted…that huge endowment of personal security that I had taken for granted as an American child of American parents in an American school in an American city in an America at peace with the world."

Instead of giving us the faux newsreel treatment of this alternate nightmare world, Roth focuses on the personal, by squeezing the cataclysmic events that take place here through the narrow vision of his young self. At first, this method can make the novel seem uneven in its fluctuations. On the one hand, there's family matters like Philip's stamp collection and his father's frustration with his salesman job, and on the other, what's happening in the outside world, World War II rumbling on without America, Lindbergh welcoming Nazis to the White House, and Walter Winchell (of all people) pressed into service by history's lottery to be the sole voice of dissent. But bit by bit, the propaganda increases, Jews like the Roths are not-so-subtly threatened outside their neighborhoods, and a pogrom seems all but inevitable. As the world comes crashing in, the family starts to split, with Philip's older brother Sandy sent off to a Kentucky farm on a suspicious sounding government-sponsored youth resettlement program where he's brainwashed in Aryan/American values and his cousin Alvin runs off to Canada to enlist so he can fight the Nazis.

What's most affecting about The Plot Against America is the convincing ease with which the country starts its swing into darkness - how under different circumstances, the same heroic generation instead could have become the stooges of fascism. It's a well-crafted depiction of the slow creep of latent intolerance, which comes out into the light, blinking and surprised by its newfound strength. Even in the midst of this racist tempest, though, Roth actually reins in his customary vitriol and lets the slow and frightened cadences of his fictional self tell the story. He's smart enough to show how one people can sometimes be as easily manipulated as another, but isn't so simplistic as to just say that, barring a Hitler or Lindbergh, America could just as easily have turned out like Nazi Germany. Here we see the horrible fragility of history, and how a time long gilded over in our national memory could have so easily been corrupted. And although some may find the book's slam-bang conclusion too neat and conspiracy-minded, there's no denying the dark thrills it provides as each piece comes clicking together.

The Plot Against America works on many levels, from personal history to sociological treatise to sternly moral invective, but is most impressive for how it uses a glimpse of a made-up world to better see the reality of our own past.